Romance & Fantasy short. A warrior has tension with the rogue in their party.
7.5k, rated M, M/M. Just some romance and learning to understand one another. A mercenary — not an adventurer, thanks much — struggles to understand the compulsive deception of the party’s rogue.
Adapted from a TweetFic. Mentions of sex work, past sexual abuse, trafficking, implied gender dysphoria, some power dynamics.
Bale has never much liked the word “adventurer”. Many of those he works and travels with disdain being called mercenaries or swordsmen or hired blades, don’t like the emphasis on the fights they get into — they want to be known for their exploring, their discovering, the mysteries they solve, the personal disputes they manage and tamp down.
As far as he sees it, they end up leaving piles of corpses either way.
Bale doesn’t see much point in equivocating. He’s been at this for years, ever since he was old enough for his father to throw his hands up and replace the hammer in his hands with a sword instead, advise him to leave the forge to him and his sister and go off to make his fortune.
Bale hasn’t made a fortune just yet, but he makes good money, sends most of it home to his da and sister — the smithy has three more floors than it used to, has boarding space for passing adventurers, and a warehouse, and shares in a local mine, and their rooms are bigger and more luxurious than they were before.
“You could retire,” his da keeps telling him. “You’re past five-and-forty — you can’t keep at it forever.”
Bale likes the idea of being called a “retiree” even less than he does an “adventurer”.
This newest hero he’s been following — it seems to Bale that every other sod is a hero or chosen one or champion or friend of the people or whatever else — is a decent sort, charitable, patient.
Too patient.
Case in point, the newest member of their party: there’s the Champion, bright-eyed and not-so-much naïve as they are painfully good-natured; there’s Deezia, a quiet and smoky mage that thankfully doesn’t show much interest in chatting to Bale; there’s Bale himself, tired and bitter and more than a bit grumpy; and now, there’s Quiver.
Bale doesn’t care for Quiver one bit.
He likes to pretend he’s slender and delicate, wears loose-fitting robes with lace edging and slit sleeves and a plunging collar that emphasise the most delicate parts of him — his pretty face and his slim, dainty wrists, and his graceful neck — but Bale has seen him stripped down. When they drop their armour after a fight and Quiver sets his leather pieces aside, the sweat makes his under pieces cling to his flesh, to the heavy muscle on his abdomen, his thick shoulders, his heavy thighs.
He is not fucking dainty, not remotely.
It drives Bale spare when he feigns weakness, keeps telling the Champion he can’t possibly fend with heavy things, keeps saying, “Oh, Bale’s your big strong man, ask him!” or “Deezia’s magic could fare much better with this than I could. What if I break a nail?”
Quiver lies easy as breathing, and Bale’s never much cared for liars.
“The fuck did you just take out of his pocket?” Bale asks out of the side of his mouth once they’re out of earshot of the village ealdorman they’d been speaking with.
“Beg pardon?” asks Quiver, his blue eyes wide as dinnerplates, trying to look innocent. He’s got a way of looking innocent, hiding behind his gently curling dark hair, all pale and hidden in the shadow of his fringe, his eyes as big as they are, his lips very pale and a little devoid of blood, but easily curved into an o.
“You picked that man’s fucking pocket,” Bale grumbles, and grabs Quiver’s wrist before it can pass all the way behind his back, making him grunt.
“I didn’t!” Quiver protests unconvincingly as Bale twists his hand. “Champion, control your dog, he’s — Ouch, you bastard, that really hurts!”
Bale presses his thumb harder into the underside of Quiver’s wrist, and Quiver’s fingers open. Bale, Deezia, and the Champion all look down at his palm. Quiver’s dusky pink cheeks have darkened to rouge.
“That’s not even worth a silver piece, Quiver,” says the Champion, with infuriatingly gentle compassion in their voice.
“Did you really just pickpocket a man for spare change?” asks Deezia amusedly, and Quiver, now bright red and scowling, wrenches his wrist — easily, Bale notes — out of his grip and stuffs the coins into the pouch slung from his belt, which is cinched very tightly compared to his robes, which are a size or two bigger than they need to be, the better to make him seem narrow around his middle.
“Thief,” Bale growls at him.
Quiver sticks out his tongue in retort.
* * *
Apart from his pathetic penchant for sweeping up pennies and small change — Bale has fast learned that any coin, no matter how small its value, left on a surface or a floor where the party go is going to be snatched up by the elf — Quiver lies about other things.
He says he was a sailor — he can’t even tie his shoelaces, and favours boots with buckles. He claims not to have any cash on him no matter the situation, even though they all know he’s rattling with coins at any moment. He feigns to be slimmer and daintier than he is, lies and says he’s weak when he’s strong, anything to avoid hard labour.
He says he’s not one for romance.
Bale’s not sure what that bit’s about, only hears the last bit of the conversation between the Champion and the elf — over the fire, Quiver says, “Sorry, my dear, I’m just not built for that sort of thing. I suppose I lack the appetites you do.”
Except Bale knows — from tailing the little fucker — otherwise.
Whenever they’re in town, Quiver never stays in a boarding house or an inn, no matter how nice the place is, and nor does he stay with the party in any home they’re offered as lodgers, or use of any property by some local landowner. He finds the nearest brothel like the dog he is, and sleeps with the whores there instead.
Bale’s always considered himself a student of other people, in a way. He’s never been much for reading books, has never found the patience nor the inclination, but reading people? He never stops.
He’s got a handle on the Champion — endlessly compassionate, selfless to a fault. The Champion had grown up in an impoverished part of the capital, and it’s made them sensitive to even the smallest indicators of inequality, let alone larger ones. They have no particular care for law and order — it seems to Bale they have no preference for going with or against the grain, so long as they’re doing the most they can for the people they’re speaking with, whoever they may be.
Deezia, beneath her sultry and uncaring surface, has a soft spot for lost causes. She pretends to be cold and distant, haughty and superior, but she’s not nearly as much as she likes to pretend she is — she likes kittens and orphaned children. She smiles at bawdy tavern songs, and has to turn her head away when a compliment catches her by surprise, because she can’t hide her smile.
Quiver?
He’s a fucking braggart.
He lies because it’s what he knows — to make himself seem more exciting, more impressive. He might be a good pickpocket, but he’s no master thief — he doesn’t notice when Bale follows after him, for example, and it’s not as though Bale is some sort of assassin.
He’s cheap. He spends money on his fucking fancy clothes and having his hair attended to, of course, not to mention whatever he must pay the working girls — or more likely, the working boys — but he claims to never have a coin on him whenever they’re offering a bribe or any payment for one service or other. He picks up coins off the floor for fuck’s sake. He rummages through the dirt for them — more than once, Bale has seen him roll up his sleeves to carefully fish them out of wet mud, and then act like a cat that got its paws wet because he hates the mess on his fingers.
They’re in the dockyard after dark, and he’s just been shining his magelight down on the boards, keeps holding them up to pick loose coins out from between the boards. Bale will say this for him — he’s got a laser eye for the fucking textured edge of one coin or other, spies them when Bale couldn’t in a million years. Bale knows full well that part of the reason Quiver’s wearing so much on him today is because they’ve been working non-stop since fucking yesterday tailing this lead, none of them having any sleep at all.
“Oi, you!” calls a fisherman as he comes in with his rowboat, the lantern wobbling on the back of his boat. “Tie me off, would ya?”
Quiver lets out an “oof!” as the coiled rope hits him in the chest, staring at the sisal braids flopping over his pretty hands. He looks blankly down at it, then uncertainly at the nearest set of cleats.
“Go on, sailor,” Bale says darkly. “You were on sailships for eight years, you’re fond of telling us. Tie the man off.”
Quiver’s burning red again from his cheeks to the tips of his pointed ears, and he all but snarls at Bale, leaning over the cleat. He hovers, uncertain, holding the rope loosely in his hands and glancing at the other tied up boats, trying to make sense of what knots are used.
“Fuck’s sake, lad, it’s not exactly arcane magic,” snaps the fisherman, and Bale shoves Quiver out of the way, taking the rope and winding it around the cleat’s T-frame, looping and crossing it over before he ties it firmly in place.
“I did sail,” Quiver turns to tell the Champion — the long day is wearing on them, too. Bale can see it in their face, in the bags under their eyes, not to mention the way they sigh as they reach back and squeeze the elf’s shoulder.
“You don’t need to lie to us, Quiver,” they murmur. “I wish you knew that by now.”
Quiver’s jaw is dropped, his eyes wide and his expression aggrieved, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. From the Champion, a statement like that is damn well near to, “I’m not mad, just disappointed,” but it still doesn’t feel like enough.
“Fuck’s sake,” Bale mutters as they keep on walking. “Will this little prick ever do something you don’t let slide? He lies about everything — ”
“I don’t — ”
“Refuses to do his share of labour — ”
“I’m here, aren’t I!?”
“And — ”
“Shut up, both of you,” hisses Deezia.
The Champion has gone still, looking out to seat at a glint in the distance. Their ship is coming in and the Light is aboard, no matter how hard they try to cover it.
* * *
He’s furious by the end of the evening, when it’s finally time for them to bed down. He’s not angry at the Champion or Deezia or at the cultists they’ve been killing. He’s furious because when the captive sailors take them back out to sea, Quiver is steady as anything on the choppy waters.
Bale fucking hates having to apologise.
* * *
It’s getting light outside by the time they make port, and after the Champion’s given word to the priests, after the Light’s been ferried back to its home, after everything’s been sorted, Bale follows Quiver through the streets, and makes no secret of it.
Quiver doesn’t even fucking notice, because of course he doesn’t.
The brothel he chooses is called Candlefire, and it’s a well-to-do sort of place, the sort of brothel that actually changes the sheets between clients, and very nice imported sheets they are too, Bale would be prepared to bet. He hangs back as Quiver talks to the pretty girl on the desk.
The girl has clocked him, even though Quiver hasn’t. Bale sees it on her lips — “… your friend?” — as she nods over the elf’s shoulder.
Quiver whirls around, and when he sees Bale, he looks so surprised he might well burst into fucking tears, then stamps toward him.
“What the fuck are you doing here, you great oaf?” he demands as Bale gets to his feet. “Are you so obsessed with me you have to stalk me through the city streets now?”
“I wanted to apologise,” Bale mutters.
Quiver peers up at him, uncomprehending.
“You obviously spent time on boats,” Bale says through gritted teeth. “I said you hadn’t — you have. I was wrong, you didn’t lie. I’m fucking sorry.”
Quiver puts one hand on a waist that’s not nearly as narrow as he likes to pretend, as he manages to make it look with his carefully considered layers. “You stalked me here to say that?” he asks, voice dripping with venom. “Are you utterly cracked? Have you taken one too many bludgeons to that thick skull of yours?”
“Had to,” says Bale.
“Had to?” Quiver repeats, raising his eyebrows and looking at him coolly, and then something in his expression changes. His eyebrows furrow a bit more, his lips twisting, and he takes a step closer, more into Bale’s space. Bale can smell the perfume he wears like this, then smell the peppermint on his breath as he comes even closer, examining Bale’s face.
He’s funny about body odour, Quiver is — he packs his clothes in dried flowers and herbs to keep them fragrant, wears different perfumes to match certain aesthetics and moods, washes near obsessively. He gets all twitchy when he hasn’t been able to have a wash in a few days.
“You really did, didn’t you?” he asks quietly. “You strange creature. So bound up in your nobility.”
“I’m no noble,” Bale says.
“No,” Quiver agrees. “And yet, you are.” He glances behind him, around the brothel that surrounds them — it’s a nice, cushy waiting room, separate to the broader tavern, and this late, it’s actually pretty quiet. “You followed me?”
“Done it before.”
Quiver’s expression is consternated already, but his brow doesn’t furrow further at that, his frown doesn’t deepen. “Have you?”
“You don’t hear as well as you pretend you do. Nor as well as other elves.”
Quiver’s hand goes up to his left ear, delicately touching the lobe. Bale doesn’t need to get into that too, he supposes, not right now.
“I just came to say sorry,” says Bale. “You might not have been a sailor, but you obviously weren’t lying about being on ships.”
“No,” says Quiver. “I wasn’t.”
Bale steps back, and Quiver grabs him by the top of his sleeve, keeping him close.
“What?” Bale asks.
“Where are you staying tonight?” asks Quiver. He’s looking at Bale’s blood-stained breastplate, not up at his face.
Bale raises his own eyebrows, looking down at him. “In a fucking inn.”
“They rent rooms here.”
“The rooms come pre-occupied.”
“They don’t have to.”
“You want to double up, is it?”
Quiver doesn’t say anything, just turns around from him and goes back to the front desk — and really, what sort of brothel has a fucking front desk? — and Bale is so tired he can’t be bothered, just follows him.
“Do you want to bathe tonight, sir?”
“I’ll bathe in the morning,” Bale says, and Quiver wrinkles his nose, giving him a foul look, but Bale ignores him as he takes his copy of the key for their room. For once, Quiver doesn’t make a show of not having money for the room, and pays the whole thing himself.
Bale strips off his armour and his clothes in the beautiful, luxurious room, which smells of rosewater and has a hot-running tap — he’ll still have a bath in the morning, but he scrubs a flannel over his chest, under his bits, between his legs, gets the worst of the sweat and grime off him.
When Quiver comes into the room, it’s in a towel — Bale is already stripped to his underclothes and is laid on one side of the bed, his head on the pillows, the blankets over him.
Quiver slides in beside him, naked, puts a hand on Bale’s chest.
“I’m fucking tired,” Bale growls at him when Quiver’s hand slides slower, over Bale’s scarred belly and down toward the waistband of his underwear. “Go to sleep.”
Quiver’s hand comes up to Bale’s shoulder, and then his palm is replaced with his cheek — Bale feels the muscle on his body. He’s fucking thin. He’s noticed Quiver doesn’t eat that much, that he rarely finishes a plate.
“You don’t find me beautiful?” asks Quiver in a whisper. Bale can’t see his face in the dark, not with Quiver’s nose buried against Bale’s neck, but he can hear the slight crack in his voice, can hear the pain in it.
“We’ve been up for nearly two fucking days, elf. I’m tired.”
Quiver huffs out a sigh, and then he goes quiet, pressed up against him, his breathing even, his heart beating steady.
Bale sleeps like the dead.
* * *
When he wakes, Quiver is sprawled on his belly beside him with his face mashed into the other pillow, the sheets tangled around his waist. There are scars on his neck Bale’s never noticed before, at the base of it where it adjoins his back — there are matching ones on his wrists.
All those years on a ship, and he never touched a rope — he was manacled, Bale supposes. His thick, gently wavy black hair is a cloud on the pillow — the rest of his body, at least, that Bale can see, is shaved clean. He did that last night, presumably, while bathing.
He thinks about Quiver telling the Champion he’s not one for romance — the sort that the Champion is, gentle and sweet and patient, Bale guesses that’s true. What did he think, that Bale would flip him over and fuck him the way he was used to? Hard, dry, to tears?
Bale gets out of bed to go take a long, long bath. Washing the sticky, foul feeling off his body takes a bit longer than the actual filth, even when one of the girls helps him get at his back, where he always manages to get blood and viscera stuck in his back hair — it trickles down the neck of his armour.
In the room, Quiver is still fast asleep, snoring softly.
Bale glances at his pack — on the table, he’s counted out all the coins he has, and they’re piled in separate trays, most of them small change in half a dozen currencies. He has an enchanted money pouch, Bale is fairly certain, to keep his coins quiet as well as lightweight.
When he looks back to the bed, Quiver is still lying there, is still making the same soft, snoring sounds, but his eyes are open, and his gaze is fixed on Bale. As Bale looks back at him, the snoring stops.
“Are you going to fuck me now?” Quiver asks. He doesn’t seem particularly enthusiastic about the idea, and Bale slings his towel over his shoulder instead of keeping it around his waist.
Quiver stares at his soft cock, at the hair on his belly, his thighs.
Bale studies his expression, the slight widening of his eyes, the shift of his lips. There’s fear there, anticipation — a bit of want, maybe, some small desire, but not nearly enough for Bale to be fucking comfortable.
“Nah,” Bale says.
“You do fuck men?”
“Sure.”
Quiver furrows his brow, as though he doesn’t quite understand the idea that Bale should fuck men in general, but not him — at the idea that he should have the option to fuck, and choose not to.
Bale starts to pull on his clothes.
Quiver pushes the sheets off his body, and Bale looks at him as he sits up, at his chest, his thighs. He’s absolutely hairless, just like Bale had thought, and but for the scars around his neck and his wrists, he’s unmarred, perfect. So skinny as he is, Bale can see the lines and definitions of his muscles, every one of them.
“Are you going to tell the Champion?” Quiver asks.
“Tell them what? That we slept on silk sheets under a canopy and took our baths in a heated pool?”
“That we did it together.”
“You want me to?”
Quiver furrows his brow, cocking his head to one side. “You’re ashamed?”
“Nope.”
“But it would wound your pride? To tell them you slept a night with me, when you hate me?”
“I don’t fucking hate you,” Bale mutters, feeling himself scowl. “I just don’t like liars, that’s all.”
“So you will tell them? Rather than lie?”
“I’ll keep quiet about the specifics. Ain’t the same as telling a lie.”
“Where were you born?”
“Steephill.”
“Why did you leave?”
“My da told me to. Said I wasn’t any good at smithing.”
“Are you?”
“Nah, he’s right. I’ve no feeling for the steel.”
“What does that mean?”
“Could never get the instinct for it, the timings, the temperatures. Smithing isn’t just science — it’s an art, too. And, uh… The metal lives, breathes, when you get it hot, put the spark of life into it. But you need to hear it, the song it sings, its heartbeat. Speak to it. I can’t.”
Quiver is cross-legged on the bed, playing with the bedsheet, pulling it between his fingertips. “Does that make you sad?” he asks, and when he puts out his hands, Bale passes him his shirt. “Are you a disappointment to your father?”
“As a blacksmith, I was. As a mercenary, he’s pretty pleased.”
“Does he treat you well?”
“He does.”
“You’re not asking me any questions,” Quiver points out, his eyes narrowing slightly, suspicion writ on his handsome features. “Why would you answer mine when I’m answering none of yours?”
“You’d lie if I asked you anything,” says Bale. “You’re a liar. It’s what you do.”
Scowling, his face scrunching up with the force of his disdain, his frustration, Quiver pulls on his shirt, then reaches for the rest of his clothes to get them on.
“You could ask me something,” he mutters. “Why assume I’d lie?”
“Your daddy collect coins?” Bale asks.
Quiver’s jaw drops, and he’s quiet and still as Bale gets the rest of his clothes on and drops them in a pile beside him on the bed, lets him start pulling them on as he gets on fastening his own armour plates.
“My mother,” he says finally as he shimmies into his leggings. “I didn’t know my father.”
“See, that’s true,” Bale says. “Didn’t hurt, did it?”
“Is it nobility that stops you fucking me?”
“Nope.”
“Does your cock work?”
“So far.”
“Have you fucked many with it?”
“Fucked a few.”
“Did they all like it?”
“Generally?”
“Did they beg for it?”
Bale stops midway through buckling on one of his pauldrons, and he looks back at Quiver, who isn’t looking back at him. He’s staring at some point in space as he pulls on his own armour. His voice is quiet as he asks the question, slightly stilted.
“No,” Bale says. “Never really got into that begging and teasing shit, all that talk and chatter. I’m not a big talker in the bedroom, don’t see the point making a theatre of it.”
“Do you hold them down?” He’s still using that same voice, a little bit distant.
“No,” Bale tells him.
“Do they hold you down?”
“No.”
“Do you like to fuck or be fucked?”
“To fuck.”
“Never the other?”
“I’ve tried it. Not for me.”
“Do you like sucking cock?”
“Now and then.”
“What’s your favourite position?”
“I like sitting back, letting someone ride me in bed — or two of us in a chair. Close together, warm.”
“Do you leave marks?”
“Don’t think so — not unless someone bruises really easy. I’m a big fella, was raised to be aware of my strength.”
“You’re gentle in the bedroom, are you?”
“Not gentle, per se, but sure, careful. I don’t like to hurt anybody.”
“What if they want to be hurt?”
“Then they can sleep with somebody else.”
“You don’t enjoy being a brute now and then?”
“I’m not a brute,” Bale says. “So, no.”
“You never want to be something you’re not?” asks Quiver in a voice that quavers now.
“I just don’t think about things like that.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t know. Too stupid, maybe.”
Quiver looks at him miserably, his lips twisting into a frown, his brow furrowing together. “You’re not stupid,” he says. “You aren’t.”
“Too simple, then.”
“Hm,” says Quiver. “Simple.”
Bale looks down at him, at the distant expression on the elf’s face. “Problem?”
“You’re simple,” Quiver says as he starts to pull on his boots. “I suppose that makes me complex.”
“I suppose,” says Bale, and drops to his knees.
He’s trying desperately not to fidget, his cheeks dark red as Bale slides each boot fully onto his foot, buckling each one up to the heavily muscled calf. Bale buckles his boots for him tighter than he can manage to do them himself.
“Did they make you shave?” Bale asks.
“Did who make me?” asks Quiver in barely more than a whisper. He’s looking at a space a foot to Bale’s left, and not at Bale’s own face.
“The sailors.”
“What sailors?”
“Do you just shave because you like it, or do you have to do it?”
Quiver’s gaze flits to the right, and he meets Bale’s gaze. “What sailors?” he asks again.
“Just wondering,” says Bale. “Not every day you meet a man hairless below the nose.”
“Are you a telepath?” asks Quiver.
“No,” says Bale.
Quiver leans in over him, looking down at him from up-close now, studying Bale’s features. He puts his hands on Bale’s cheeks, his thumbs on the stubble there — his hands are slim, but muscular, no matter how delicately he holds them. His fingernails are finely manicured and puffed to a shine.
“What sailors?” he asks again.
Bale reaches up with one finger and pushes back one of his flouncy laced sleeves so that they’re both looking at the manacle bite dug into the skin there, raised, white, a ghost of the metal clasp left behind. Quiver looks from the inside of his own wrist to Bale’s face. Bale finishes the last buckle on his boot.
“Is that why you won’t fuck me?” he asks quietly. “You feel sorry for me, is that it?”
“Never said I wouldn’t fuck you,” says Bale. “But I’m not a brute, no matter how big I am. Not rough, not interested in leaving marks. Not interested in hurting you.”
Quiver doesn’t say anything, and slowly withdraws his hands.
* * *
After the mess of the last few days, they get through easier work, little tasks and errands, take it easy. Quiver is on tenterhooks, clearly waiting for the Champion or Deezia to ask where he and Bale went together the other night, but neither of them do.
“Do you ever go in brothels?” Deezia asks.
“Sometimes,” says Bale.
“You don’t feel disgusting, paying for flesh?”
“They’re brothels, not butchers,” Bale says. “And no. They provide a service, company. I provide the coin.”
“Men,” Deezia mutters, clucking her tongue and shaking her head.
“I served women as well as men, when I worked in brothels,” says Quiver. “Not as many, but more than occasionally.”
All four of them are silent for several minutes.
“Oh,” Deezia says finally.
“Let’s move on,” says the Champion.
* * *
Quiver is lethal in a fight. There’s something glorious about watching him when he stops pretending he’s useless and actually puts himself to work — Bale hangs back as they come into one bustling crowd of men, all of them ex-soldiers with beer in their bellies, all of them busting for a fight.
He doesn’t see exactly what the trigger is. He hears one of them call Quiver a pretty boy, but he doesn’t think it’s that — one of them touches him, maybe, or perhaps just tries to grab him wrong. Whatever it is, the elf snaps and punches one of them, and they react as an angry mob.
He cuts through them like he’s a hot blade and they’re just so much butter.
Bale watches, mystified, at the sheer speed of him, the strength he’s showing now that he so often tries to hide — he throws one of them all the way across the fucking bar, sending him careening into a glass cabinet that shatters into a shower of glass; another he flips like it’s easy, the man landing with a hard thunk onto the floor, his nose cracking with a spray of blood.
The third lunges for him and Bale sees the glint in Quiver’s eyes as he turns to face him, palm clapping about the man’s throat and he fucking snaps the man’s neck with just that hand, doesn’t even need both of them — he just keeps his grip on his throat and squeezes until he hears a snap.
It’s like watching a master musician with their instrument, except that Quiver doesn’t even draw a blade.
At the end of it, Quiver is left breathing heavily. The pile of bodies — a few dead, most just unconscious or in too much pain to move — are strewn about his feet, and Quiver turns now to look at Bale.
There’s blood spattered on his chin — one of them had managed to split his lip. He’d all but tore the cunt’s fucking ear off.
Otherwise, there’s not a fucking bruise on him.
“Beautiful,” Bale says softly, almost unthinkingly, and Quiver’s lips pull back from his teeth, giving him a withering look.
“I’m not going to top you,” he says, almost spits the world.
Bale grins despite himself. “I wouldn’t let you fucking try.”
Quiver is midway through wiping his split lip with the heel of his hand, carefully avoiding any of it on his sleeve, but he smiles at that, almost shyly, warmly. He seems bashful under those dark curls of his; his eyes glitter.
“Do you think I’m pretty?” he asks softly. He’s stacked with glistening muscle, shining with sweat and blood. A man beneath him groans and stirs; Quiver shoves the sharp heel of his boot into the meat of his throat, and twists until he goes silent.
“Oh, yeah,” Bale says. “Pretty as a fucking picture. Pretty as a bride.”
“Going to marry me now?”
“Want me to get on my knees?”
Quiver blinks. Giggles. Actually giggles, turning his face away like he can’t handle meeting Bale’s gaze all of a sudden. “Awful,” he mutters as he pulls his heel out of the corpse beneath him, shaking the blood off of his boot, and sashays out.
Sighing, Bale looks to the terrified barman, who has some of his friends’ blood spattered on the front of his apron.
“I don’t have to interrogate you, do I?” Bale asks mildly. “Can we just agree you’ll answer my fucking questions, or I call the pretty elf back in?”
The barman nods, and Bale trudges over.
* * *
The next time they make camp, Bale is laid out on his back beside the fire, occasionally turning the spit, and Quiver comes to lie on top of him. Bale is stripped down to his small clothes to cope with the hot and balmy evening, and Quiver is just in his breeches and a loose chemise, a silk one he pilfered off a noble’s corpse last week. It’s a bit big for him, which makes it perfect for him to sleep in.
He’d slit the man’s thigh open instead of his throat to keep the white cloth clean.
Quiver straddles Bale’s thighs, says nothing as he lies on top of him, his cheek against Bale’s shoulder. His perfume is nice, like this — the floral scent is as much of a blanket as he is.
“This isn’t comfortable,” Bale says.
“Make it comfortable, then,” Quiver retorts, and Bale grips him by the hips and tilts him to the side, onto the blanket that Bale is laid on, and slides one of his thighs between the elf’s legs.
Quiver gazes into his eyes, their two heads now sharing a pillow, Bale’s hand resting on his hip.
“You like that?” Bale asks. “How easy I can move you, lift you?”
“Telepathy again,” Quiver accuses him, playing with the hem of Bale’s vest, which is ragged in places — he’s only really wearing it to soak up some of the sweat before he goes to bed. “Have you ever whored?”
“Now and then, when I was younger,” Bale says. “In my twenties, when sex was new, different, when I wanted a professional’s expertise. Nowadays I know what I like — and I like sex better than business. Still pay now and then for a massage or a hand in the bath, but that’s all.”
“I don’t mean that,” Quiver says. “Have you ever whored?”
“Oh,” Bale murmurs. He looks at Quiver’s handsome face, at the line of his jaw, his throat, the shadows under his eyes, the sculpted shape of his eyebrows. “No.”
“You don’t want to sell your body?”
“We’re mercenaries. We are selling our bodies.”
Quiver smiles at that.
Bale gently tugs Quiver’s chin down, brushes their lips together. He doesn’t deepen the kiss, just keeps it light, and Quiver sighs softly so that Bale can smell his peppermint breath again.
“It’s not the same,” Quiver murmurs.
“It isn’t,” Bale agrees. “But also, it is.”
They eat. They lie back down — a little further from the fire pit now, but still within reach of its light.
Bale drowsily opens his eyes as the Champion douses it for the night, crouching beside them. Quiver is asleep and snoring gently, wrapped in one of Bale’s arms. He doesn’t know if the elf is really asleep or not, couldn’t begin to know.
“This is new,” murmurs the Champion. “I thought you didn’t like him.”
“He’s a little prick,” says Bale.
Quiver’s face is buried in his chest, and he can feel the warmth of his exhalations, one of his arms banded around Bale’s waist, keeping him close.
“Uh huh,” says the Champion. Naturally, they don’t take the rejection personally, what it was Quiver had said to them, turning them down before — if anything, they just seem interested, looking over Quiver’s loose, sleeping body, at how relaxed it is.
“I didn’t know you liked men,” they say.
“Pretty ones,” says Bale.
“He is pretty,” they muse aloud, a slight smile tugging at their lips as they get to their feet to go to bed. “Isn’t he?”
* * *
Bale falls deeply asleep, and when he wakes, it’s sprawled on his belly. The dawn has broken, and Quiver is sitting up straight, sharpening his daggers, Bale’s face mashed into one of his thighs.
“Do you dream?” he asks.
“Sometimes,” says Bale.
“Tonight?”
“No.”
“I dream every night.”
“Nightmares?”
“Yes.”
“Bad?”
“Yes.”
“The sailors?”
“What sailors?”
Bale turns his head to the side again, looks at Quiver’s moneypouch, stuffed with small change.
“Has anyone ever forced themselves on you?” asks Quiver.
“Once or twice, when I was a young lad.”
“Women?”
“A man grabbed me in an alley once, went to bend me over. I was shocked and scared, froze up — he fucked between my thighs, didn’t shove inside, but it was nasty. The feeling of his spend on my thighs, the way my cock got hard as if I liked it. Felt like such an idiot for just letting him do it. And a little while after a woman in a tavern forced my face into her tits, grabbed my cock — it didn’t go any further.”
“It frightened you?”
“Shook me, yeah. Didn’t stick enough to really scare me, I suppose. I got taller after that, filled out. Big man, now — people mostly don’t want to mess. I still get comments, a few strokes or touches to the chest, the waist, but I can’t be manhandled any longer.”
Quiver says nothing.
“Were they gentler with you, when you were smaller?” Bale asks. “Treat you as more delicate, when they thought of you as prettier? Treat you more like a woman, maybe?”
“I’ve never thought about it,” says Quiver.
Guilt gnaws inside him for asking. “Maybe,” Bale says. “It’s a bit of a chore for people to see you as a strong man, sometimes. Means they expect you to save yourself — no one wants to look after a strong man.”
Quiver gently draws the tip of his blade against Bale’s cheek, pressing on the flesh without cutting. “I’ll look after you,” he says. It’s never occurred to Bale that someone can be so gentle with such a sharp and well-honed blade — he can feel the drag of it against his stubble, tugging on the short, bristly hairs without shaving any of them down, let alone cutting him.
“What sailors?” Bale asks, his head still back in Quiver’s lap. The blade moves back and forth over his beard, tickling the hairs, and then sits underneath his chin, pressing in close with the flat of the blade. Bale can feel his own heart beating against the metal.
“They took me,” Quiver murmurs, “for a night, a party, for the brothel, and then they kept me. Manacled me by the neck and the wrists in the lord merchant’s chamber — it was a luxury passenger vessel. I was among the luxuries on offer.”
Bale reaches up, wrapping his hands loosely around his wrist and gently stroking the soft inside of the skin there. He can feel the scars under his thumb.
“But I was too much like the women,” Quiver says. “Pretty, elvhen. Delicate. They made me eat. Train.”
“They made you eat?” Bale repeats, and Quiver nods his head.
“I used to be… I was never so slim as I am now. I was plumper. Prettier — I had rounder cheeks, my figure was fuller. I’m made up of so many hard lines now, whether muscle or bone.” He’s touching his own face with the hand not holding the knife. “They made me eat more — and, and exercise. Lift weights. Climb the masthead. Fight. So I was more like the men — more like a masculine man. I know I could stop. Stop… fighting. But I only know how to sell my body one of two ways. I don’t know anything else.”
“You could pickpocket,” says Bale.
“People need their money,” Quiver murmurs. “At least when I take small coins from people with no need of them, no one is going hungry.”
Bale looks over at the dead embers of the fire, and then sits up, reaching for parchment from his bag and a quill.
“You’re writing a letter?” Quiver asks.
“I want you to deliver it,” Bale says.
Quiver’s expression is more than sceptical. “Your suggestion is that I put aside mercenary work and sex work both, that I might become a messenger boy instead?”
“Nope,” says Bale. “I’ve got something else in mind. Indulge me, won’t you?”
“Fine, fine,” Quiver says, and looks with mild curiosity over Bale’s shoulder as he scrawls onto the page.
* * *
Three months later, Bale trudges up the path to home — the smithy is still lit up with the evening light, the forge aglow, and he can see his sister working it, the hammer moving at a familiar rhythm.
“Welcome home, little brother,” she calls, and he gives her a wave and a grin before he steps inside.
The forge is separate from the new inn — not new anymore, not really, but new enough that Bale still finds himself surprised whenever he comes home, still expecting what it once was. When he was a child, this building was just a disused storehouse, and now, it’s lit up and cosy.
A fire burns in the hearth, and there are people laughing and drinking together — mercenaries themselves, many of them, taking a break as they pass through on the rest of their journey.
Bale’s father can still work the forge, but he’s not as fit as he once was. He’s sitting at a table beside the bar, going through the books with a pair of eyeglasses he hadn’t needed to rely on the last time Bale was home, and as Bale watches, Quiver brings over a tray from behind the bar.
“Gods damn it, boy, I’m not drinking that swill,” he growls.
“You aren’t this moment, but you will if you know what’s good for you,” Quiver retorts. “I’m not having your heart giving out because you’re too stubborn to take your medicine.”
“It tastes — ”
“A rectal administration can be arranged,” says Quiver coldly. “You won’t taste an enema.”
Bale watches, stifling his laughter, as his father stares up at the elf, then reluctantly picks up the glass and knocks it back, drinking the potion inside with a cough and an expression of disgust.
Quiver looks good. He’s gained a bit of weight, playing the role of tavern boy — it’s subtle, only the work of a few months, but his face has softened a little, his cheeks rounded out in a way they weren’t before.
“Want a real drink?” Quiver asks.
“Fine,” Bale’s father says. Quiver nods, the tray folding under his arm.
Before he can pull away, Bale’s father hooks one of the loops on Quiver’s belt and stops him short, says, “Here,” and passes up a coin from the till count. “Rare, this one. Double-headed.”
Quiver smiles, and as Bale watches, feeling a sort of warmth in his belly akin to the glow of the fire behind him, he leans down and kisses his father on the top of his head.
“Fuck off with you,” growls Bale’s father, and Quiver’s laugh is airy and bell-like, one of his hips cocked as he turns and sees Bale.
Quiver’s expression falters, his jaw slackening. His laughter fades into a softer, warmer smile, and he passes the coin loosely between his fingers.
“Alright, Da?” Bale asks.
“No,” the old man says. “This girl you’ve sent home is a fucking menace.”
“A menace you don’t deserve,” says Quiver, folding the coin into the pocket of his apron and sashaying back behind the bar, beginning to pour two ales.
Bale looks down at the old man as he shrugs his satchel off his shoulder, setting it to the side of his accounting table so that he can take what’s inside and count it up separate to the float and today’s profits.
“Do you like him?” Bale asks.
“Not as much as you do,” his father says, quieter now. “But he’s a good boy.”
“He’s a terrible boy,” Bale replies, grasping his father’s hand and squeezing it tightly, then clapping him on the shoulder as he moves past, toward the bar.
He puts a smaller pouch of coins on the bartop between him and Quiver.
“Paying for drinks in your own tavern?” Quiver asks mildly.
“More rare coins,” says Bale, rubbing the back of his neck. “Didn’t realise my da was giving them to you too.”
Quiver’s cheeks are glowing pink. “He’s a nice old man,” he murmurs.
“He’s a horrible old man,” Bale says, “but I’m glad he and Vella are looking after you.”
“I’m looking after myself,” says Quiver, pushing a tankard across to him. Before Bale can take it, he grasps Bale’s hand instead, slides his thumb over his palm. “How’s the Champion?”
“Good,” Bale says. “They’ll come through in a few days with Deezia and Lemox before we head on for Mortar.”
“A few days in a little town like this?” asks Quiver, and puts his pretty chin in the palm of his pretty hand. “How ever will you spend them?”
“Not sure,” Bale says as Quiver unlaces the pouch and spreads the contents on the bar, picking through the coins with a smile pulling at his lips. “Any ideas? I’ve got good coin to put toward them.”
“I see that,” says Quiver. “I might have a few suggestions.” He laughs, his eyes sparkling, and they clink their tankards together before they each take a sip. “Let’s start with a simple one — heads, you go upstairs with the pretty elf serving drinks. Tails, you take the empty kegs out for him first.”
“I’m just home — ” Bale starts to complain, and then he sees Quiver take the coin his father had just given him out of his apron front pocket, twirling the double-headed sovereign between his fingers. “Okay, fine. I’ll take that bet.”
“Good man,” murmurs Quiver, and flicks it into the air.
FIN.
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